excerpt from:
Culture in the Service of the State:
The Myth of the Native Speaker
By J. Paul Narkunas
©2004
The political desire of nation-states to produce national subjects not only creates subjects to serve in war to protect the security of the nation or participants in the political process of democracy, but also manufactures subjects who can facilitate national economic development. National subjects must "fit" nicely with market demands. According to market logic, a national language offers a purported "transparent" means of communication through a "shared" common language, facilitating the market's need for subjects who can communicate with each other. Language can, therefore, be a primary mechanism for the state to organize humans for the market. I will outline below one of the most crucial techniques that states use to police the limits of the US national community through the immigration legal machinery, and the myth of a native language, represented by the native speaker. The myth of the native speaker functions as a technology of power for policing the community: a rendering visible of a particular mode of linguistic communication that will simultaneously create connections between disparate peoples, while isolating others within the territory of the nation-state.
"Immigrants" are a legal category of the nation-state. The category serves to police the border of the regional or national community by marking which humans can be brought together or must be cast outside the community. Indeed, the juridical and epistemological category of the "immigrant" determines the limits and the exception of who gains entrance into the nation. The US is a republic, and thereby citizenship is an effect of a constitutional contract. The US cannot rely, therefore, on any unifying organic myth of an essential "national being" emanating from the territory to embody the nation, as was the case in Germany.[1]Consequently, US immigration laws, since they began to take shape in the nineteenth century, have determined historically who is recognized as a citizen by the state.
The earliest immigration laws, from the 1790's, were racially based allowing naturalization only to "free white persons"--(persons defined as being a man and owning property)--who lived in the US and swore allegiance to the constitution. Legal mechanisms instituted racial quota systems and by implication suggested an "authentic" US national subject through racial and ethnic histories. National origin became the ontological and legal marker of humans who could "be" in the US, instead of a sense of essential national being emanating from the territory. Indeed, many of the criteria for citizenship in the US draw on the evolutionary and utilitarian theories of Herbert Spenser and Charles Darwin applied to race and ethnicity, and then language. [2] Following a social Darwinist belief in evolution, immigrants only "evolve" into US citizens after surviving the disciplinary mechanisms of the state. Ironically, to enjoy the right of becoming American requires that one enter into communion with state technologies and the latter's paradoxical policing of individual rights.
Contrary to Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's romantic goal of creating a national culture through literary production, concepts of national identity in the US may have had less to do with intellectuals, writers, or cultural formations than with bureaucratic decision-making and economic necessity.[3] The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has, historically, been identified with policing the border of the community; however, the INS, as we know it, is an invention of the post-WWII period. Until 1875 each individual state formulated its own immigration policy; in that year, the Supreme Court announced that the regulation of immigration was a Federal responsibility. Immigration was initially tied to the Department of Customs, which seemed more interested in extracting taxes than regulating the citizenry of the US. For example, early immigration laws such as the Immigration Act of 1882, the same year incidentally as the Chinese Exclusion Act, charged $00.50 for each immigrant. When the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration was created with the Immigration Act of 1891, the Department of the Treasury became the primary overseer of immigration, indicating the lucrative economic benefits of immigration for the state. From this moment on, processing and regulating immigrants became the charge of the federal government.[4] As immigration became increasingly bureaucratized, the immigration and naturalization departments split off into two arms: one entrusted with processing new immigrants and another with policing and border control by standardizing the limits of naturalization. (They were reunited in 1933, and separated again in 2002 through the Homeland Security Act, which creates the Office of Border Control and the Office of Citizenship under the Department of Homeland Security. The administration charged with recognizing "citizens" has symbolically moved from the Department of Justice to Homeland Security.) The Naturalization Bureau published the first Federal Textbook on Citizenship in 1918, thus ushering in the first steps to create a model of the national subject. Ironically, the bureaucracy of the INS created the first criteria by which to measure a US national subject.
The treatment of Chinese, Filipino, and African immigrants, who were in the US before the enactment of race-based immigration laws during the twentieth century, suggest an important horizon for thinking the state's flexible, fluid, and often informal techniques of control. Many of these immigrant groups did not incur legal attacks on their existence until poor whites felt financially threatened and demanded that specific US states intervene on their behalf against any competition (new immigrants). Most early mechanisms for disciplining Asian immigrants, for example, were initially financial and informal (local or state taxes or fines), rather than an effect of specific national laws that prohibited their existence. (The latter did not take place until the 20th century.) Virtually every law regulating Asian and southeast European immigration emerged in response to transformations in the economy. Indeed, economic concerns mobilized racial categories because of their expedience for manufacturing dissent around race and ethnicity and frustrating possible strategic solidarities among the dispossessed around economic and political disenfranchisement.
The Jim Crow Laws in the post-Civil War South performed a similar process by maintaining or limiting surplus labor to foster commerce, while subjugating particular peoples within the state. Before many of the Asian Exclusion laws, Jim Crow had created a two-tiered system of education. Educational access was segregated along racial lines to perpetuate the slave economy in the south. Blacks were denied access to the "universal right" of education, even after Civil War provisions for ending slavery and redistributing wealth. As W.E.B. Du Bois acknowledged, for every five dollars spent on education in the southern states, only one went to the education of blacks despite being a larger portion of the population (1999). Whites institutionalized "illiteracy" to limit employment possibilities for blacks, and maintain their status as unskilled labor, and as a docile population. In other words, literacy tests were frequently given to keep blacks from voting, as well as to perpetuate the notion that they were not worth educating, that they were not human.[5] Jim Crow laws in effect policed the limits of the human by not only segregating the races, but also keeping blacks from acquiring the language of state (langage d'Žtat). They were, therefore, easily cast as illiterate and "not-human." If they were not conceived as human, they could not be US citizens, vote, and be protected by the law. Language in effect played the role of power by designating a limit for the national subject and the human being who could be protected by the legal community. This technique of power potentially served as a model for later immigration policies in the twentieth century.
The Basic Naturalization Act of 1906 was created in response to a labor surplus from immigration and an economy in recession that could not accommodate these new immigrants, and instituted the first language requirement for national citizenship. Language acquisition served as a mechanism to control labor flows into the United States. However, the specific requirements for naturalization included only the ability to speak and understand English through oral communication; literacy writ large would not be a goal until later. At this point of industrialization (1906), the ability to communicate through speech acts was imperative for improving the efficiency of labor and avoiding miscommunication between workers and managers. In short, acquisition of the English language would expedite communicability [6] and serve a dual, albeit paradoxical, function: to control surplus immigrant labor and facilitate the unmitigated flow of capital and money. The first language requirements in the US were not, however, asserted to edify the supreme authority of the central government and national culture. The state apparatus was initially interested only in race and ethnicity as the mode of "hailing" its national subjects. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1921 national-origins quota system armed with eugenics theories and designed to destroy an inchoate cross-cultural and linguistic labor movement (the Wobblies), and the tyrannical 1924 Johnson-Reed Act are the most egregious examples of these laws.[7] It wasn't until 1917 with the Immigration Act that the first literacy requirements came on the scene; they mandated that new immigrants know only forty words in "some" language. Interestingly, literacy requirements were not restricted to English, but the immigrant's native language, whatever it may be. Only with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 would the national-origins and racial-origins quota systems be challenged, and anti-communism, instead, became the foremost criteria for citizenship. However, since revoking racial-origins laws, which still persist in effect through more elaborate quota systems [8] literacy has functioned, with political affinities (a raging anticommunism and unspoken anti-Semitism), as the foremost measure for naturalization.
Citizenship in the US is now marked by bearing the "right" ethnic make-up and national origin according to national origin quotas; showing the ability to speak, read, and write "reasonably correct prose"; and demonstrating competence in mimicking the state's heroic history of itself through a civics test. [9]
Language provides a privileged place for thinking these strategies of national containment, particularly how the notion of authenticity is used through the concept of the "native speaker." In the US the notion of the "native speaker" has historically functioned as a fiction of power and convenience to mark an "authentic" subjectivity and the limits of the nation. [10] Yet the "authentic" subject of US language cannot rely on an originary Herderian or romantic fiction of culture or language connected to territory. [11] Language, in the US context, had to be imported first and then united with the territory in order to create an organizing principle to incorporate disparate peoples. At the same time, this language facilitated commerce, and systematically exterminated the indigenous languages of the Native Americans.
By considering the myth of the "native speaker" in the US, we can see how language requirements do not emerge miraculously, but are fostered by nation-states as the defining fact of recognizing humans. States mobilize the category of the "human subject" as a being capable of language. Yet the nation-state adjudicates the limits of what the subject can be through his/her respective languages. In other words, a concept of universal humanity is systematically impossible because states create people who can only be recognized as "authentic" humans within a particular national language. These humans may have a language, but this language marks a debt to a nationally-determined social order. Indeed, humans owe their humanity to their respective nation-states, which can ironically hinder the political and legal organization of humans around the category of universal humanity!
Public and private educational systems, and literacy programs in US universities, currently foster this "state" concept of the "authentic national human" by cultivating literate subjects for the market. Literacy promotes a desire for language to serve as a transparent vehicle of communication for the free flow of informationÑa vehicle for expressing oneself and communicating within a community--be it commercial, political, or cultural. Literacy requirements simultaneously try to forget their Jim Crow past and assimilate disparate singular persons into a collective memory of national language. Interestingly, they use a discourse of individualization and freedom to obtain this incorporation into language. Learning English, we are told, will set an individual free to communicate well within the community. Nevertheless, the incapacity to speak the English language or any national language does not banish one from the human community, except in the regressive eyes of nation-states trying to control their populations. Nor does a "native speaker" necessarily demonstrate command of the English language if the incessant laments on the reading and writing abilities of contemporary American students can be taken as exemplary. This technique can incorporate disparate racially-marked subjects, while seemingly creating a hierarchy between those who master the language and those who struggle. In the process, it can legitimate state racism, and pit those races dispossessed by the power structure against each other. Although literacy advocates generally describe this configuration as the failure of the individual to achieve self-consciousness through language, this breakdown might encourage reflection, instead, on linguistic indeterminacy, and the arbitrariness of national communities, language, and how literature might provoke these concerns.
Indeed, considering the uncertainty of language might force deliberation on other forms of singular human practices, such as the process of thought, that occur before incorporation into a concept of authentic subjectivity or national language. It might also help to emphasize the fluidity and mutability of power relations and conceptions of human existence itself. This is the place where literature can help to critique a global system. Language may have an existence that is not premised merely on the desire for communication and the transmission of transparent information. Literature as a practice of thought exemplifies this. The discourses of subjectivity thrive, however, on putting language at the service of a subject, and rely on a belief in the ontological truth claims of knowledge and law. Language becomes thereby something that must be conquered--like a territory--through literacy, suggesting a functionalized approach to language acquisition and a conception of knowledge being connected to territory. There is perhaps a need to think subjects as contingent forms of figuration, as effects rather than agents of language. Thinking agency as a figure is perhaps best conceived through some of the strategies of literature in the very material context of human practices. These processes can thwart an uncritical faith in the transparency of communication, and the truth claims of the native speaker and national subject.
1. Gregory Jusdanis exhaustively traces different concepts of nation formation in the Euro-American context in The Necessary Nation. Specifically, he identifies the distinction between organic concepts of nationhood, the gemeinschaft/gesellschaft connection (Germany), and contract formation (US, France). This text is indispensable for thinking the function of the nation in the present. *
2. For this entire section, I am indebted to the following studies on immigration: David Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History; Ellis Cose, A Nation of Strangers: Prejudice, Politics, and the Populating of America; James Crawford, Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of "English Only"; Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1950; Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2d ed.; Maldwyn Allen Jones, American Immigration. *
3. F.O Matthiesen's "American Renaissance" nicely documents this neo-romantic desire that helps us to think about national formation in the US as heavily indebted to German romanticism, perhaps best represented by Whitman's project for the great poem of America, and Melville's desire for an American Shakespeare. *
4. The Federal Immigration Station at Ellis Island opened in 1892, where 119 of the entire staff of 180 federal workers worked. Soon thereafter, the bureau of immigration transferred to the Department of Commerce and Labor. *
5. Du Bois in one of his articles for The Crisis, entitled "Race Intelligence," critiqued also the use of science in order to perpetuate racial ideology. He acknowledges how M.R. Trabue Director of the Bureau of Educational Service, Columbia University uses an unfair statistical test to maintain in effect the slave system. Trabue claims that "the intelligence of the average southern Negro is equal to that of a 9-year-old white boy and that we should arrange our educational program to make `waiters, porters, scavengers and the like' of most Negroes!" in Writings (1986, 1182). The recent findings from the University of Chicago compiled in The Bell Curve suggest that nineteenth century eugenics theory is still very present, armed with the epistemological certitude of statistics.*
6. The use of English as the national language was much debated throughout the nineteenth century, given the numbers of German speaking immigrants to the US throughout the 18th century and early nineteenth century. From the certification of early US documents, like the US constitutions and the Declaration of Independence, the choice of English seemed to be favored as the langage d'Žtat. *
7. The Johnson-Reed Act, directed most forcibly against Asians, Jews and Italians, argued for the preservation of America's racial composition, due to the "impossibility" of assimilating Eastern and Southern Europeans. In many ways, this policy similarly portrays the race-based theories of the German Reich. AsiansÑparticularly Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos--bore the brunt of these repressive measures. For example, beyond the obvious Chinese Exclusion Act and Teddy Roosevelt's "Gentleman's Agreement" in 1907-08, the 1917 literacy requirement designated Asia as a "barred zone" from which immigration would not even be entertained. *
8. With the adoption of the national-origins quota system in 1921, the role of the census in identifying specific ethnicities was used to police entrance into the community. The quota system required an elaborate apparatus to document the ethnicities already "let in," based on race and ethnic categories, and set a limit of 3% of each foreign-born nationality based on figures from the 1890 census. *
9. For more information, see the US Citizenship and Immigration Sources' sample citizenship exam questions on their website at http://uscis.gov/graphics/services/natz/100q.pdf . It is questionable if many born into citizenship could pass these tests. *
10. For more information, see Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny. *
11. I draw heavily from German romantic and idealist theories of language, like Johann Fichte, Schleiermacher, Johann Goethe, Johann Herder, the Brothers Schlegel, and Frederick Schiller. Herder, for example, articulated how language was secular, and thereby created by humans. Because there was no divine entity calling language into existence, language ultimately helped to define the limits of human expression and thought through the people or Volk. At the same time, language was capable of capturing or providing a form of expression for reality and human subjects themselves. Yet, as Herder acknowledged there were different languages, so language was primarily national because it sprang (ursprung for Herder) from particular territorial limits, which ultimately determined the field of experience and thought along cultural lines. For Herder, nations were linguistic and cultural not racial, yet language seemed to provide the humanizing glue by being able to express or render the world intelligible, creating a connection between language, literature, and the referent to express experience adequately. In this regard, Herder's concept of culture is not all that different from many cultural studies critics. See (Herder). Rousseau may also be an interesting figure in this conversation, for he shares some of the territorial determinism and the fixity of reference exhibited by Herder. His theories on the social contract and how language helps to define human experience provides a similar faith in landscape and expression. Paul De Man, however, dramatically recasts the political import of Rousseau's project by highlighting how literature and language are essential for understanding political formations, precisely because they provide strategies for challenging the stable boundary between reference and figuration. Indeed, as De Man on Rousseau warns: "Far from being a repression of the political, as Althusser would have it, literature is condemned to being the truly political mode of discourse. The relationship of discourse to the political praxis cannot be described in psychological or psycho linguistic terms, but rather in terms of the relationship between referential and figural semantic fields" (De Man 157). The historical role of the German romantics in articulating a concept of the nation through language and literature has been a recurring motif in American literary production. Indeed, Matthiesen's "American renaissance" traces the role of mid-nineteenth century artists to create a national subject through language and literature. National literary studies in the Anglo-context must also acknowledge an unofficial debt to these romantic mechanisms that often foster, ironically, the creative role of the imagination, but at a national level, frustrating thereby cultural or linguistic difference. Matthiesen. Due to issues of space, I cannot adequately address the complexity of these issues fully. My manuscript, Flotsam and Jetsam in Global Capital Flows: Transcultural Interrogations of English in the US as Literature, Power, and Commodity, more explicitly articulates the stakes of literature as a political act within globalization. *